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If you take a look at Spore's listing on Amazon.com, you may be surprised to notice that the game (as of this writing) has an abysmal user rating of one-and-a-half stars. But that isn't necessarily an indictment of the game's qualityout of 184 customer reviews, 159 are one-star ratings, and just about all of them have one thing in common: pure, vile hatred of the game's digital rights management, or DRM (via Destructoid).

Like the PC version of Mass Effect before it, Spore's DRM limits owners to only three activations of the game after installation. The point is to prohibit software pirates from sharing and reusing activation codes over and over, but it also means that if a user happens to uninstall and reinstall Spore more than three times for completely legitimate reasons, they'll have to contact Electronic Arts customer support to request and have approved a new authentication on a case-by-case basis. Which is precisely what has Amazon users up in arms.

A quick scan of the negative reviews reveals some bitterly sensationalistic headlines: "DRM Kills another potentially great game," "Not a chance until the DRM goes," and "DRM complicates life, removes value." One reviewer, who calls the DRM "draconian," even likened a purchase to a rental as opposed to an actual ownership of the game, since a player could theoretically be barred from playing their copy of Spore if they use up their activations and EA refuses to allow more. "What you will be left with is a nice, colorful $50 coaster. And you will be required to pay for another copy/license if you want to continue playing," the user writes.

And believe it or not, this backlash comes after EA and Maxis made Spore's DRM less stringent, when fans decried the originally announced plan to require online authentication every 10 days. As for how much the Amazon debacle will affect sales of the game remains uncertain, but it's probably a PR problem that EA and Maxis could have happily lived without.